Status, Mobility and Anomie: A Study in Readiness for Desegregation

r NHE SIGNIFI CANCE of social status and social mobility as variables in the analysis of social action is by now taken for granted. This is true even though there is considerable unevenness in how these variables are defined and measured, and in the ways and degrees to which the effects of these variables are evidenced. These variables take on added importance when their implications for social integration and anomie are considered. Status refers to position in a social order, and mobility to changes in such positions. Differential positions tend frequently to receive differential evaluation. Therefore, one of the most important effects to be expected is the degree to which persons with diffierent statusand mobility-profiles feel differently valued by their social order, and act as if they were differently integrated into its norms. These effects probably are most noticeable when insecurity, anxiety, and a genera] sensitivity to questions of status are widespread, as is so often the case in an open class system.l Social changes which threaten status arrangements ought therefore to be viewed with different degrees of alarm, and resistance to such changes should emerge in proportion to the degree of threat which is experienced. Desegregation, as it refers to the promised amelioration of the positions of Negroes in our society, is one such major change. Expectably, reactions to desegregation vary in degree and quality of resistance. In this paper we shall examine the extent to which diffierences in attitudes towards desegregation are related to differences in status and mobility . The data to be reported come from a study conducted in Guilford County, North Carolina, in the fall of I 956. An area-probability sample of 287 White adult (over I8) members of the labour force was interviewed. The principal aim of the study was to discover the lines along which diffierences in readiness and resistance to desegregation were distributed. Toward this end a number of sociological background